HE came like a hero. He fled like a bandit. For six months, no amount of shaming could force Sen. Ronald “Bato” Dela Rosa to answer the call of duty. Until it was time to save one person from an imminent shaming of being undressed in public.
By choosing to shun the workplace — unless he worked remotely, which is what Leila de Lima and Antonio Trillanes tried to do when they served jail time as sitting senators — Bato scammed the millions who voted him to office, in effect despising a sovereign mandate.
But on Monday, May 11, 2026, he suddenly appeared on the Senate floor to help his kind elect Alan Peter Cayetano as yet again the new Senate president, replacing Vicente Sotto III. How he made it in time to reconstitute a new majority is a masterpiece in precision. It was comparable to a Michael Jordan game-winning play, with zero seconds left, and Calvin Abueva choking him from behind. For a feat that could alter the course of the nation’s history, he could be the hero of the day.
He initially looked worried about being hauled away in handcuffs. It seemed the full scale of the unfolding plot was beyond him. Denied to thousands of scampering suspects felled by assassins’ bullets in a drug war he supervised, there was for him a back alley the width of a runway by which he could flee anytime he wished, but he did not seem to see it. Until 50 hours later, when he was gone, just as surreptitiously as he had shown up. No one knows how the Bato script played out, or how the long game will play out.
Anyone denying anything is probably how any mastermind would want it.
Because it is possible — like how the government appears to be making a show of arresting fugitives like Elizaldy “Zaldy” Co and Charlie “Atong” Ang — he and his tales are being preserved for future use.
What complicates the reading of Bato is the mosaic façade. His tough guy image is a handy cover for a chicken, which is an outrageous insult to game birds that, if you ask Atong’s kind, fight to the last drop of their blood. The bravado he displayed months ago over the threat of an International Criminal Court arrest warrant turned to horror when the threat, in the form of arresting officers, materialized before him.
The dash to safety on that fateful afternoon, ending in the embrace of like-minded senators on Senate grounds that belong to no one but the people, left images of shame and betrayal. Skipping the lift for a mad gallop-run on the staircase, Bato was a sight of a terrified rat. That was scary for his fans. He could have ended worse than being bruised on one finger, probably from a gecko-like grip on the rail to keep his balance. What a way to waste a national treasure: a rare earth, no matter how thick the dirt that covers it; a gemstone, no matter how pliant; a rock, no matter how soluble.
The show continues with a staccato of gunfire somewhere in the mid-floors of the Senate building. Before the smoke cleared, Bato was gone.
What he accomplished was the consolidation of a bunch that included senators hurt by the mention of their links to anomalies in committee reports, particularly by the blue ribbon, headed by Panfilo Lacson. The act was as fleeting as birds making love in the air. The way it unraveled was so atypical that no decent transition seeker may replicate it. It paved the ground for the veneration of the corrupt. A nation tired of official malfeasance had hoped to reshape its history, but that longing is now in doubt, given a Senate that owes its dramatic reconfiguration to Bato’s heroic run.
Saving Vice President Sara Duterte may have been his sole motivation. But he deprives a nation of its restful sleep, a country of confederates engaged in perpetuating control by political dynasties.
From his threesome with Sen. Bong Go and Davao City Mayor Baste Duterte, nothing but psalms of mutual edification can be heard in public, yet at least two of them could, in private, be positioning themselves to steal the spotlight if and when Sara is out of the way. She could be the ultimate prize that is better left unclaimed.
The latest Senate shake-up hints at two objectives. One is to block or at least delay the trial of Sara’s impeachment case until something shitty — like a wet blanket from the courts — happens. That Cayetano denies it makes it obvious: for the world has learned to decode the truth from the opposite of anything he says. The other is a variation of the main line, which is to mount a frame through which the charges can be seen as nothing more than partisan hubris.
Both, however, can be undermined by public pressure. A Sara-friendly Senate can better manage perception, because left alone, in the order of WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get), the evidence presented at the “pretrial” conducted by the justice committee of the House of Representatives is enough to condemn a saint.
Sotto said the National Bureau of Investigation (NBI) told him that Bato would resurface on the day he must have thought he was going to be unseated.
If they truly wanted to, there was no way the combined forces of the NBI and the Department of the Interior and Local Government (DILG)-Philippine National Police could fail in the task of denying Bato his niche in history. Never mind the supposedly ICC arrest warrant ready to be served; there was a subpoena, whose subsequent recall by the DILG showed that somebody was bluffing all along.
The takeaway?
Don’t let the administration’s display of incompetence fool you. We never know if the impeachment of the vice president, whose rich kid tantrums are surprisingly missing recently, was meant, away from the public eye, to placate Martin Romualdez and the Senate shake-up that augurs well for Sara to keep her lead in the race to 2028, was meant to keep even half of the promises made between the fumbling partners of the UniTeam.
There is honor, after all, even among thieves. Politicians like Bato do not answer to the call of duty and the mandate of the sovereign voter. They answer to where the winds of self-interest are blowing, the spoils of dynastic wars. Their master is the scent of a vulture who finds the rot, no matter how deftly hidden.
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